Murder, lies, and more murder fuel some great TV this week

There's a number of highly anticipated new shows this week. And good news: they are pretty good.

This week you will see the best episode of TV this year.

Netflix has a very splashy murder mystery comedy in the form of The Residence which has a murder take place on the same night as a function for Australian dignitaries is taking place. I find it very funny that Julian McMahon, the son of an actual former Australian Prime Minister, is here playing the PM.

The show is stacked with familiar faces from all manner of comedy shows and movies we have been watching over the past 30 or so years - you’ll want your IMDB app open on your phone so you can finally put names to some of those faces. Spencer Garrett will be one of your first searches.

While the show is certainly entertaining enough and has a few very good jokes and fun characters, it’s all a bit too much. The tone a bit too ironic, the emotions too heightened, the episode lengths a bit too long. After a while it just felt exhausting and was doing all it could to discourage me from binge watching the show. An episode a night for the next week might work nicely though.

There may have been one moment in the first episode that did lose me. Isiah Whitlock Jr. is given the task of introducing Uzo Aduba’s character Cornelia Cupp into the show and boldly states that she is the “best detective in the world”. Why must shows do that? I don’t need to know that the detective/lawyer/doctor/whatever that we are watching is the worlds best. It limits the audience’s ability to evaluate the skill of the character themselves and strips away any likelihood that the character is likely to fail. Also, the best people are never fun to watch - flawed characters are always a blast to watch.

The wildest news story of the last few years has found its way to television with Good American Family. A couple adopt a 7 year-old girl with dwarfism and it soon became evident that this girl wasn’t a pre-teen at all, but rather was an adult woman. Yeah… wild!

Ellen Pompeo from Grey’s Anatomy stars opposite Mark Duplass and the two do a great job to not only ground the nutty premise (again… based in fact!), but also make the rocky relationship between the couple feel genuine. It’s smart, trashy TV.

I haven’t pressed play yet on Happy Face, which is another show heavily inspired by a true crime story. Reviews on it seem pretty mixed, but with a strong cast and Robert & Michelle King on board as EPs (it’s not them running the show, however…), I’m inclined to want to press play.

But if you only have one hour this weekend you can dedicate to TV, you should spend it with what I am fairly certain will be the hour making it right to the top of most critics lists this year…